Wednesday, February 7, 2018

One of the ongoing questions at Calixtlahuaca has been the
degree of specialized production at the site. This could either take the form
of particular households that focused on producing high quantities of a
particular type of good, or the entire site specializing in producing something
for trade on a regional scale. We know that specialization at both of these
levels occurs at sites in both the Basin of Mexico and in Morelos. Among many
other cases, the site of Otumba included specialized workshops to produce obsidian
tools, and a neighborhood that made clay figurines and spindle whorls (Charlton, et al. 1991; Parry 1990).
Cuexcomate and Capilco in Morelos has site-wide specialization in cotton production,
and some households also made amate-bark paper (Fauman-Fichman 1999; Smith and Heath-Smith 1993).

Calixtlahuaca has been frustrating in this regard – most of
the standard lines of evidence for craft production have come back negative (Huster 2016:Chap. 5). Neither the survey nor the excavation located
areas of intensive obsidian working. The INAA and petrographic data for
ceramics showed a wide range of variation within the broader local groups, a pattern
consistent with many small producers. We only located a couple of molds for
making figurines or other small clay objects, and there are very few duplicates
among the finished molded items among our collections. There are a few spindle
whorls for cotton spinning, but the frequencies are far lower than in other areas
where it was too also too cold to grow cotton.

I’m currently evaluating whether maguey (agave) production might
be sitewide or regional-scale specialty. I had previously discarded it a
household-level specialization, because pretty much all of the households had
some evidence for maguey textile production and none of them stood out as
unusual when compared within the site. However, when compared on a regional
scale, some lines of evidence suggest that the amount of maguey processing was
similar to sites such as Cihuatecpan or Tepetitlan (Cobean and Mastache 1999; Evans 2005), which researchers have
argued were sites specializing in maguey products. This would be an interesting
finding, because the usual explanation is that people in Central Mexico focus on
growing maguey (and other cacti) in areas where it is too dry to reliably grow
corn (Parsons and Darling 2000), and the number of cornfields
I flailed through while surveying Calixtlahuaca would suggest that this is not
the case there. The Codex Mendoza tribute lists for the provide also include both
maguey fiber textiles (a fairly uncommon item, limited to a single geographic cluster of provinces) and unusually high quantities of corn (2 bins, rather
than the usual one), which would suggest that the two crops were both economically
important in the region.

One of the 2006 survey crews trying to figure out how to lay out a surface collection in the middle of a modern cornfield at the site.

References:

Charlton, Thomas H., Deborah L. Nichols and
Cynthia Otis Charlton

1991Aztec craft production and specialization: archaeological
evidence from the city-state of Otumba, Mexico. World Archaeology 23:p. 98-114.

2005Men, Women and Maguey: The Houshold Division of Labor Among
Aztec Farmers. In Settlement, subsistence, and social
complexity : essays honoring the legacy of Jeffrey R. Parsons, edited by R.
E. Blanton. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, University of California, Los
Angeles.

Fauman-Fichman, Ruth

1999Postclassic Craft Prodution in Morelos, Mexico: The Cotton
Thread Industry in the Provinces.
Doctoral Dissertation, Department of Anthropology, University of Pittsburgh,
Pittsburgh.

Huster, Angela C.

2016The Effects of Aztec Conquest on Provincial Commoner
Households at Calixtlahuaca, Mexico.
Doctoral Dissertation, School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona
State University, Tempe, AZ.

Parry, William J.

1990Analysis of Chipped Stone Artifacts from Otumba and
Neighboring Rural Sites in the Eastern Teotihuacan Valley of Mexico. In Preliminary
Report of Recent Research in the Otumba City-State, edited by T. H.
Charlton and D. L. Nichols. vol. 3. University of Iowa, Department of
Anthropology, Research Report, Iowa City.